10 Google products tapped by icy finger of the Grim Reaper

Google will spend the next few months killing off ten products that just weren …

Google will spend the next few months killing off ten products that just weren’t successful or can be put to better use through integration with existing Google services such as search and Chrome.

As CEO Larry Page noted in a recent earnings call, Google has “a few small speculative projects happening at any given time,” but spends the vast majority of its money and staff on its core technologies. To avoid clutter and the appearance of wastefulness to shareholders, Google has to trim the list now and then.

“Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features,” Google Senior Vice President Alan Eustace wrote in a blog post last week. The products to be shut down are Aardvark, Google Desktop, Fast Flip, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security, Image Labeler, Notebook, Sidewiki, and Subscribed Links.

While some of the products will disappear completely, others will live on in one form or another. Google Web Security was part of the Postini acquisition in 2007, and is pitched to enterprise IT customers as having the ability to block malware and integrate with directory services for “granular enforcement and reporting.” While it will no longer exist as a standalone product, the technology that powers Google Web Security will continue blocking malware in the Chrome browser, which didn’t exist when Google purchased Postini.

The e-mail security portion of Postini seems poised to live on as a separate brand, and Postini services are also integrated into the Google Apps suite of office applications. Aardvark, meanwhile, was a startup acquired by Google in 2010 to boost “social search,” in which questions are answered by fellow Google users rather than Google algorithms. The concept is similar to Quora, but seems to have failed at Google. Instead of promising to integrate Aardvark into other products, Eustace merely writes that “we’ll continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world.”

The Google Desktop product has been around since the ancient times of 2004, and gave users a desktop widget that displayed news and could search for files on their computers. With the new emphasis on cloud-based computing, Google says this product is no longer necessary, and all support will be discontinued on Sept. 14.

The Google Maps API for Flash move could be disruptive for some developers. The tool “was launched to provide ActionScript developers a way to integrate Google Maps into their applications,” Google notes, referring to the Adobe ActionScript programming language. Existing customers of the Maps API Premier service will continue to receive support, but Google will shift development effort to the JavaScript Maps API.

Regarding the other Google products on the chopping block, Fast Flip is a news-reading tool designed to make online articles look more like print ones; Google Pack is a downloadable set of software tools from Google and third parties; Image Labeler is a tool for exploring and labeling images on the Web; Notebook was a notes service similar to Evernote; Sidewiki is a browser extension that let users add content to any webpage; and Subscribed Links is targeted at developers who wanted to create specialized search results.

For Notebook, Sidewiki and Subscribed Links, users will be given some time to download their content. In the case of Notebook, all data will also be automatically exported to Google Docs.